"For every hour worked in school children will spend 2 hours working a home!"
Within 20 minutes of the start of the lesson, I had five students ask me if they could continue working on this topic at home. Another one asked if he and his friends could share some of the work, separate from the lesson, but running parallel to it, and work on that at home or at lunchtime. A show of hands at the end of the lesson shows that 90% of the class said they wanted to work on this topic at home.
"For every hour worked in school children will spend 2 hours working a home!"
That is a remarkable statement and it was made by a year 6 teacher at Aldwyn Primary School during a meeting with Paul, NCCE Greater Manchester Computing Hub Lead. He was frankly astonished by the way the school were mixing traditional and digital skills throughout various lessons without actually having many dedicated ICT lessons.
Children have a lot to learn from working at home. They will learn how to be more independent and depend on themselves, as well as be able to develop their own interests. The best thing about it is that children can continue their education while at the same time giving them a chance to grow in their own unique way, which can be hard otherwise.
The children benefit you by working at home on projects they do not get bored and they do not get distracted by other things. Children also benefit because they can work relaxed and learn new things.
Here are 5 tips to get your students working from home.
- Make sure children are familiar with your chosen home learning system (Microsoft Teams or Google Workspace for Education).
- Make sure the topic is exciting, use the same assignment children are using in class and make sure all the links and documents they need to access are on the assignment and children know what each is for.
- Make sure children know how to log into external cloud-based software that might be used during the lesson.
- Don’t set an agenda - remember this is something they want to do in their own time so they should be able to choose what they want to do.
- Heap a ton of praise on any work completed at home and be prepared to show that work during the next lesson.
Those simple steps should work with all schools which have 21st-century learning platforms (providing children know how to use them). It's having access to these platforms that make children so keen on working at home making them independent learners and allowing them to find the answers to their own questions.
Aldwyn Primary - The Learning Zone